Income streams allow you to create and manage multiple businesses and/or properties in Coconut. You can assign an income stream to a set of business transactions to report on your client's expenses and income broken down by business and/or property, allowing you to easily prepare for tax figures for HMRC.
We've also added a suite of supporting reports for each business type, including the SA103S, SA105 (FHL and non-FHL supported) and SA106.
In order to set income streams up, you or your client will need to do the following:
Create any income streams that you want to report on and assign a primary income stream (explained later).
Assign the correct income streams to the relevant business transactions
Create an income stream
Before you can assign an income stream to a transaction, you’ll need to create it in Coconut. Your client will always have one income stream by default either when they create their Coconut account or if they had a pre-existed one. You may want to update this with a new name or type based on your client's information or add more income streams to support multiple businesses/properties by following the steps below:
Navigate to ‘Client details’ tab and under ‘Income streams’, click ‘Add income stream’.
This will open up a window where you need fill in the details of your client's income stream.
Give the income stream a name. This should be something you or your client recognise and that you associate with each business transaction.
Select a business type. This is the type that HMRC defines the business as. We've provided a breakdown for these here.
If you selected a property type, you’ll have the option to set a % ownership. If your client is the sole owner, leave this as 100%, otherwise adjust this based on % split in the property. This will let us submit the correct calculation for income, expenses and tax saving suggestion for the property.
If this is a new income stream, you’ll also be able to set it as your primary income stream if you choose.
Setting a primary income stream
Setting an income stream as primary, means that whenever we capture a new business transaction through a connected bank feed, we’ll automatically assign it to the primary income stream.
Your client will always need to have a primary income stream selected so we know where to assign transactions, but this can be changed at any time.
We recommend that customers set their main business as the primary income stream. That way they'll only ever need to change income stream on transactions for their other businesses.
To change primary income stream, click on the action button on the income stream row and then click ‘Set as primary’. This will only apply to new transactions and won’t replace the income stream on any previous transactions.
Assign income stream
In order for Coconut to know which transactions belong to a given income stream, they'll need to be assigned to the transaction. We’ll assign any new business transactions to your ‘primary income stream’ by default, but you or your client will be able to change it on the transactions too.
Assigning income streams to transactions works the same as assigning categories:
Find the transaction you want to change in the transaction list and click on the transaction to open the ‘edit’ window.
Note: if you set the category to 'Personal' you won't be able to set an income stream as it's not a business transaction.
In the edit window, select the income stream from the drop-down menu. Note this will only show income streams that are ‘enabled’. Click ‘Save’ and you’re done!
Disable income stream
If your client has set up an income stream but are no longer using it, you may want to ‘hide’ it, so that it no longer appears as a selection for use.
Navigate to ‘Client details’ tab and under ‘Income streams’, find the income stream you want to disable and click on the three dots in right hand-side of the income stream row.
Select ‘Disable’ - this will bring up a window where you can confirm whether or not you want to disable the income stream. Once confirmed, the income stream will be disabled meaning it won’t appear as an option in the dropdown menus.
Bulk updates
If you want to update more than one transaction at once, you can do this using the re-categorise action in web:
Select all transactions as you want to update using the tickbox on the left hand-side of the transactions.
At the top right of the transaction table, a new button will appear ‘Re-categorise transactions’. Click it to open a new window.
In the re-categorise window update the income stream for all the selected transactions using the drop-down menu. Hit save and all of your selected transactions will now be updated with your selected income stream.
Change an Income Stream type
Sometimes you may need to change the type of an income stream. For example, if it was set up as the wrong type initially, or the type changes status (for example from UK Property to FHL). You can change the type any time by:
Going to the Client Details view
Click on the Actions button on the income stream you want to update
Select a new type from the list and click Save.
Self-Assessment Reports
Once you have allocated transactions to income streams, you can view and download the reports you need from the 'Reports' tab for completing self-assessment filings. See the links below for more.
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